Unquestioning pride in everything that our country does may be good for some, but definitely not for all Americans. Many thought that principle was established during the Vietnam and Iraq wars, where lies about the Gulf of Tonkin incident drew protest by those who didn’t blindly believe all that their government was telling them. Many didn’t want to appear to be supporting the government in this endeavor which they felt were based on lies. Lies that if Vietnam Fell to Ho Chi Minh’s Communists from the north, Laos, Thailand, the Philippines would then all fall like dominos in a row. Lies about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Lies that got us into wars that became disasters. Lies that they challenged and protested. Colin Kaepernick started the current brouhaha at the San Francisco 49ers first regular season game by sitting and not holding his hand over his heart during the playing of the national anthem. He did this in protest of white-America’s ignoring the police-killings of unarmed blacks. He had a message, but...

As predicted here and elsewhere, the post-convention bounces of both candidates receded back to pretty much where they were going into the conventions. Due in part to the Republican convention going first, and Donald’s seemingly self-destruction behaviors, his bounce was shorter lived and smaller than Hillary’s. The latter’s larger-than-expected convention bounce pretty much disappeared under a barrage of new attacks about her emails and, this past weekend, under the glare of a newsworthy intrepid cell-phone video, the world saw Hillary alarmingly collapse trying to get into her limousine after suddenly leaving an outdoor service honoring victims of the 9-11 tragedy. Hillary’s doctor released a statement blaming the incident on dehydration, while dropping the bombshell that she had been diagnosed the previous Friday with pneumonia. The fact that Clinton appeared an hour and a half later waving to admirers, posing for a picture with a young child, and looking fine and hydrated, was lost to the mass media. CNN kept, and continues to keep, showing the video of her apparent faint–far...

The growing wealth and income gap between the top 1 percent and the other 99 percent has reached staggering dimensions. And now, more than ever, the “have-nots” are made up largely by the middle class, which now includes many “workers.” Years ago I dismissed Marx’s class conflict theory as yet another, albeit more radical, utopian socialist dream. Then in my first, of a long line of classes, taken and then taught, about communism, in both theory and practice, I continued to be intrigued by Lenin’s 1917 tract: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Now, nearly 100 years after Lenin wrote his theory of imperialism, and the first time since The Great Depression, Lenin’s check-list for revolution appears close to being realized. Ironically that is largely due to the policies of the “haves” themselves. Whether this has come about mostly by greed or by ignorance is unclear. What is clear, however, is that policy differences between Tump and Clinton will go a long way towards deciding how peaceful a revolution...

The decades long attacks on Hillary Clinton, from Whitewater, back in the nineties, to Benghazi now, have succeeded in raising doubts among voters about her trustworthiness. Nevertheless, she still leads Donald Trump by a healthy 7 or so points in most national polls. One interesting phenomenon polls also reveal, is that former Republican Mayor of New York’s assertion that being from New York he “knows a con when he sees one”–and that Donald Trump “is a con,” is bore out by polls of New York voters. Keep in mind that New York’s voters not only know Trump better than anyone else, but they also know Clinton best, having had her as their US. Senator for two terms. So whom do New Yorkers favor in the race for president? Even including the pre-conventions Quinnipiac Poll, the RCPPoll of Polls for New York has her leading by 17 points. A new Siena poll shows that Hillary Clinton has an overwhelming 25 points lead over Donald Trump. And, that lead is...

Seventy years of bi-partisanship have gone into creating a credible deterrence strategy to cope with the challenges posed to our foreign policy in an era of nuclear powers and the means of delivering them. Our deterrence strategy rests upon the elimination and reduction of doubt as to whether certain actions against ourselves and our allies will produce a response by the U.S. that is unacceptable to a potential enemy. The weaving of alliances and other measures taken to implement and maintain this strategy has been supported by every President, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State, both Republican and Democratic, since the fateful dropping of those early atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended World War II and ushered in the dangerous nuclear age. This credibility of our response and commitments to our allies have been seriously, if not fatally, weakened by Donald Trump’s clearly ignorant insertion of doubt into the equation. He might as well have invited North Korea across the “no-man’s land” and across the 38th parallel and on into our...

What you say? The world may hang in the balance and Americans don’t care; they have joined the craze that has mushroomed all over the world, like popcorn popping. What am I talking about? Why Pokemon-Go, of course. Haven’t you seen otherwise normal-seeming people getting their exercise, walking fast, and with their heads focused in on the cell phones while frantically moving their fingers on the keyboard? Watch out, it looks like they will walk right into the intersection. Will they get hit by that car coming? What are they doing? They are looking at images of the area in front of their smart phone’s camera, trying to find, capture, destroy little cartoon characters that pop up on their screens right in front of them. Pokemon. Yes the same as those annoying little critters found on trading cards in an earlier generation. If you had children of the right age during that period you surely saw them obsessed with those cards. Hell, you might even have felt the...